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SCO Caps Legal Expenses At $31 Million
uniqueCondition points to a story on News.com, writing "With SCO's legal costs reaching $7.3 million in their most recent quarter, nearly half of the $15 million it has spent in the last five quarters, SCO can't afford this kind of litigation. They have therefore limited their payment to $31 million for the entire case and is giving their legal team a larger slice of any settlement SCO achieves. Under the current agreement, the firm's contingency payment is 20 percent of a settlement. Under the new agreement, that increases to a range of 20 to 33 percent." uniqueCondition links also to coverage at Techrepublic.com, InformationWeek and The Inquirer.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Does anyone know why after making a post, your IP is contacted by a Slashdot-server (in my case 66.35.250.150), which makes a "GET /" request, and on success further requests to the links in the directory-index.
Try it: post something, then watch your access_log.
Then SCO has to fend off Novell, RedHat and Autozone on any counterclaims they may have. Then they all could sue SCO for slander of title, abuse of process. If the GPL holds up in court, everyone that has code in Linux (including IBM, SUSE, RedHat, etc) could sue for damages. The only winners for SCO are the execs that have cashed out. But the SEC is looking into that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They still believe they can win and are in the right... I live in Provo UT (student at BYU; yes yes I know crazy mormons blah blah blah, i totally agree)... Anyways I go to the same church ward as Ralph Yarro (Chairman of the Board of SCO, and CEO of Canopy Group)... Every Sunday I love to slam Ralphie with questions about what's going on on the SCO Titanic... He tells me over and over that they (SCO) have the moral highground and are in the right... He also says that in his heart of hearts he believes they will win the lawsuite against IBM... And after a win against IBM, he thinks the lawsuites like the ones against Chysler and AutoZone, will all just start to drop in... Whatever crack that guy's smokin'... I want some...
I find it pretty amazing that SCO has the cajones to believe that anybody would be interested in taking them over. I believe that their stock is as high as it is right now (if under $4 a share is high) only because SCO has been buying it's own stock. What do they own? They have some money in the bank, much of which they owe to their lawyers and to others; they also own a UNIX distribution that that people are not busting down the doors to buy. SCO seems to believe that they own the copyright to System V, Linux and UNIX in general; they may actually own some sort of rights to System V, but SCO's copyright claims are being contested by somed of the current owners. SCO has a number of pending lawsuits, and so far the verdicts in their lawsuits have been against them. Their anti-takeover defense is as useless as any of their other claims.
The following is my speculation about how the cap came about.
I am not a lawyer, and I don't know anything you don't know.
I'm just guessing. Having said that...
I suspect it was the law firm's idea.
I'm sure by this time Boise & Co realize that they're just "taking
the dog for a walk" (that is, they know, based on the facts, the law,
and their opponents, that they're gonna lose). They're experienced
at losing. Unless they're idiots, they recognize that the value of their
contingency upside potential is pretty close to $0. They also know
the depth of SCO's pockets, and how much they can pump out of
the well before it goes dry (there's a mixed metaphor). They know
that, when it's all over, SCO will be worthless and just a dry corpse.
They've calculated how long they can continue to delay the inevitable,
and how much SCO needs to stay alive until then. I don't know what
they think the final date will be, but obviously they think SCO will need
$12M to stay alive that long. SCO has $43M, and Boise & Co can do
simple arithmetic. Presto! Boise & Co offers to cap their expenses at
$31M.
Boise & Co knows what needs to be done (billable hours), and what they
can skip in order to save their client money (billable hours that would
extend beyond $31M). I predict that the final gavel will fall with a thud
at just about the same time that the legal invoice reaches $31M, and at
the same instant that SCO's $12M is exhausted.
With their track record for losing cases, I suspect that this is the
kind of thing the Boise & Co is GOOD at!
Wait 3 months, and that contribution is reduced to a nickel.
"And from reviewing all the filings, it's clear Boise et al weren't exactly working overtime with their best and brightest in putting the case together."
I went through the Australian industrial court system a while back (I was claiming unfair dismissal). Fortunately for me, I had a contact in the state parliament who was able to hook me up with excellent representation. Not cheap, not big, but very good. My former employers went with the biggest names in town. Their representation, however, was unbelievably incompitent.
After all was said and done, I came to the conclusion that their legal firm worked out very early that the case was a lost cause. For such cases I imagined that they have a pool of disposable lawyers whose directive is to draw the case out as long as possible (standard practice for lawyers to maximize profit, I guess) then take the courtroom beating thereby protecting the record of the firm's more "respected" lawyers.
At the end of FY 2003, SCO president McBride got a $755,000 bonus, more than triple his salary, for his excellent performance.
They want to avoid people posting through open proxies since open proxies are the standard method of ban evasion by trolls. So I assume when you post, they do some quick checks to check for evidence your computer has any sort of open or web-based proxy on it.
I assume if they hit anything, they'll either block you from posting further, or just flag you as a potential "problem user" or something. I suppose the thing to do here would be set up an open proxy on your computer and then attempt to post from it, and see if antyhing happens.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Well here is evidence SCO knows its going to lose and the lawyers think they are going to win.
No, this is Darl's attempt to make you *think* that the lawyers think they're gonna win.
If you had a client on contingency, and you thought they were gonna lose, wouldn't you try to get a fixed amount of money out of them? That's what the $31M is for - it's in a reserved account that SCO can't touch until the case is over.
The "increase" in contingency is window dressing so that Darl can tell people that their lawyers think they'll win.
You can bet that Boies insisted on the $31M, and Darl insisted on the 33%.
Hold those law-weasels accountable for 20% of any damages IBM, Red Hat or others might be awarded in return salvos at SCO. That might teach lawyers to be a bit more selective about which idiotic cases they bring to the courts.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'